


We Prepared Our Graves

by orphan_account



Category: AFI
Genre: AOD era, Angst, Burials Era, Fantasy, Frat House era, M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-01 23:43:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2791997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Davey travels fourteen years into the past to warn his former self about future heartbreak.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Prepared Our Graves

**Author's Note:**

> This story was, probably very obviously, inspired by Greater Than 84. If you want to know how Davey managed to time travel, the answer is THE OCCULT. Or, the fool proof sling shot around the sun method perfected by the intrepid Captain James Kirk. You decide. Reader's choice.
> 
> I feel like this story is manipulative in its sadness. I made myself sad while writing it. It was going to have two other parts but they ended up not happening, which is the opposite of how stories of mine usually end up. What I'm trying to say is that this is a weird little piece and I really like but but I'm not sure anyone else will. Let me know if you do! I don't own them and it never happened.

The room is much smaller than you remember it being. Small like your high school auditorium feels when you return for your brother’s jazz concert, small like a fish tank might be for a whale. Small like a memory. You stand, unreal and unrealized, in the center of this too-small world, and holds your hands out.You feel like you could touch the poster-papered walls on either side of you, but you cannot. There is an inhalation, shaking, and the smell of fourteen years stings in your lungs. You are already choking. _I can’t do this_ is the thought repeating. 

But you stay. You know you must stay, because if you don’t, then your past and future, this whole story you’ve written, won’t make sense. You are fulfilling a self-fulfilling prophecy. You have to complete the circle. Your eyes adjust to darkness, and even though you know what this room looks like from the fierce, technicolor way the memories of it have been burnt into the insides of your eyelids for the last decade, you are stupidly stunned by each new revelation. 

There’s a messy book shelf, and on it there are dust-choked Tim Burton figurines, VHS tapes. Things you sold or lost along the way. Your record player is open, and inside of it there’s the familiar blue-marbling of your Bivouac pressing. You stare at it, and want to go over and touch it, even though this same record is still a part of your collection, sitting fourteen years in the future amid your other rare vinyl, in the frosted glass case you rarely open anymore. 

The floor is littered in heaps of black clothing. Belts twist like snakes around your feet, and you realized that in the first year of the new millennium, you were still wearing leather. There are islands of used tissues, dirty boxers, crumpled paper from a yellow legal pad upon which you will eventually write the lyrics which will become _A Great Disappointment_.

The room is a map of your former self. The self you lost, the self you deny. The self Jade loved, left, murdered. The self which now sleeps tangled on the bed in the corner, a tuft of dark hair visible above filthy twisted sheets. A skinny shoulder, an arm draped over an invisible Jade. Your breath catches as you see them together. 

You wait, unsure of what to do next. You’re not sure you remember how it happened, it just happened. You came to yourself in a dream, that’s all you recall. You watch your youth and the love of your youth rise and fall in tandem breath, and feel the ancient fault-lines in your heart rift again. A hand on your chest, you touch the feeling with tentative fingers. _I can’t do this._

But you do. The younger Davey twitches, sighs, and then rolls over. Dark eyes slide open and blink. He sees you. He sees himself. “I’m dreaming,” he rasps, rubbing his sleep-crumpled face. The voice is so achingly young you want to hold it in your palms, you want to preserve it like a butterfly with a pin through its abdomen, forever trapped flightless against cork board. Safe from the things which will poison it, make it decay. 

“Yes,” you say in your own much lower, much hoarser voice. Coming closer you watch him disentangle his limbs from a sleeping Jade. The terrible, folly part of yourself who still holds this memory dear flutters inside, wants to say, _don’t move. Don’t let go of him. Just stay right there so I can watch you two together and remember what it was like._ But you silence it, because of course, that’s the exact opposite of what you came here to do. 

“So...who are you?” Davey says in that voice like water-clear, sitting up in bed. There are old eyeliner smudges beneath his eyes, chipped polish on his nails. He looks much younger than you remember looking when this was you. 

You lean your hip gingerly into the foot of the mattress, half-sitting. Folding your hands in your lap, you cough, sigh, and begin. “I’m you,” is the first thing you remember yourself saying, so you say it. “Fourteen years in the future.” 

His eyes rove your frame in a skeptical once over. “Really.” 

Nodding, you turn to him and role up the sleeve of your shirt to reveal the narrow strip of un-tattooed skin above the knob of your wrist. You point to a nearly invisible scar there, on the lattice work of blue veins you didn’t drain when you could have and should have. “You burnt yourself here a few years ago with the lighter you use for your candles. First and last time. It wasn’t the type of pain you were looking for.” 

He stares, then reaches out. He stops just before he touches you, pale hand dropping back down to the sheets. “I’ve never had lucid dreams before.” 

_And you never will again_ you think. Jade stirs to Davey’s right, and your heart leaps up into your throat. This Jade is long dead, and he is the one you lost everything for. You think about this Jade every day, you long for him impossibly, miss him like a phantom limb. He doesn’t exist in the future, but here he is, alive, breathing, pure. Your eyes sting at every thought of him. _What would he think were he to see me? How old would he think I am? Would he still find me beautiful? Love any incarnation? Or was even this Jade’s love conditional?_ and over and over again like breathing, _It doesn’t matter, he’s not mine._

The Davey on the bed, the person you once were, subconsciously rests his hand on the hills and valleys that are Jade’s sleeping body, and smooth them to stillness and silence. _Did we really touch that freely then?_ You wonder. 

Davey cocks his head, and his devil locks falls into his line of vision. You want to brush it away. You want to apologize for how you failed him. 

“So whats the future like? I’m surprised humanity it still around at all.” He smirks. He thinks he is talking to a dream version of his future self, not his real future self. You know because this was you. If you had known, you would have acted differently. You would have been scared, wanting to know nothing and everything, praying that the world still felt rapturous with the heaven-on-earth which came from being newly in love with Jade. 

Of course, that’s the exact opposite of what you came here to do. “I’m here to tell you something,” you explain, whispering even though you know you cannot wake Jade. 

“Nothing good, I’m sure,” he says, studying you. “Future selves never come back in time bearing good news, right?” You can see him start to recognize the lines of your face. He touches his jaw as he traces yours with his eyes, careful and subconscious. You don’t remember doing this, but you must have. 

You nod. “You aren’t going to want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear it.” 

“So this is a nightmare?” He smiles, thinking he’s clever. Your young self is so foolish and arrogant that he thinks he is clever, even in his dreams. This is the spirit you are trying to break, and henceforth protect by breaking. You are trying to save your immortal soul. 

“I don’t know,” you tell him. “It’s a warning.” 

He narrows his eyes. “Okay. What does my future self have to warn me about?” 

You inhale raggedly, and stare at the bolus of clothing at the edge of the bed. Old shirts you got rid of years ago, twined with shirts Jade still wears. He didn’t have to purge his entire wardrobe the way you did, he didn’t have to destroy and recreate himself every few years in vain attempts to burn his mistakes down. He didn’t have to travel fourteen years into the past and try and right some grievous wrong. He cares nothing of his immortal soul. You glance up at Davey’s expectant eyes, and say it, say the impossible. “You have to stop things with Jade.”

He laughs, scoffing as you once did. You watch him shake his head and rake his hand through his hair. “If you really are me, then you know I can’t and won’t.” 

You nod. “Of course I do. That’s what I did, and I ended up here, talking to you. Think about that,” you say. There’s a tremor to your words which make them sound desperate. They probably are desperate. Sometimes you are so numb you forget what desperation feels like. 

He stops and chews on his lip ring. You still have scar tissue from that thing, you tongue it when you’re nervous, when you can’t sleep. Without meaning to, the habit begins again, and the two of you make the bed a mirror. “What happens?” He asks, carefully. 

“Everything you’re afraid of. I remember, I remember how you thought you couldn’t grow old. But you do. You do. I’m here. I can prove it,” you explain, leaning in closer to him. He shies away from your words and your body, his gaze growing dark and his hand tightening on Jade’s sleeping thigh. 

Then he shakes his head, sets his jaw in a defiant grimace. “But I’m in control of my own future. Don’t you trust that if you tell me what goes wrong I can avoid it? Fix it? Why do we just have to _stop_?” 

You look away, towards the familiar, cloying darkness of the room you never had time to clean because you were always so busy, so wrapped up in a chaotic storm of creation. You were always writing with Jade, inventing with Jade, theorizing with Jade, elbow deep in Jade, fucking him in every way you knew how. You were consumed in his fire, you were so brilliantly, terribly ablaze with him that it seemed unthinkable to imagine it burning out. Smoldering, flickering, being reduced to ash. This Davey, he cannot comprehend a future where he is not consumed by the same fire. “I don’t know how to explain it in a way you can understand, but no, I don’t. I know you. You can’t fix things because the way it gets fucked up isn’t something you can _fix_. You just have to quit, now, while it’s still beautiful.” 

He’s quiet for a long time, mouth pursed into something flat, uncertain. He’s not looking at you. He’s looking at Jade. He reaches for him, combs his fingers through the short hair at the base of his skull, smooths down his shoulder, his sternum, eyes soft and half-lidded. He loves him in such a palpably pure way it makes you feel dead in comparison. You peer inside your ribcage, unwrap the sick, withered thing which remains of this once pure love for Jade, and mourn it. 

And this, this is what you’re here to do. What you’re here to preserve. “I remember what this feels like. And it doesn’t stay like this,” you tell him, very quietly. 

“You also have to know that I don’t care,” he murmurs back, eyes never leaving Jade. “I don’t care at all. I can’t. I’ll follow it to its end, until I burn out. That’s what I do. You know what I do.” 

You’re shaking your head, your eyes are welling up for all the selves which have died horrible, unromantic deaths at the cost of this pathology. “You don’t know how bad it gets.” 

He looks up, and he’s smiling the stupid, placid smile of someone young and unbroken. Someone who believes he can be saved by love, but does not realize yet that he believes it. That is, after all, what true innocence is. “It doesn’t matter. I can’t stop. Neither of us can. No possible fate I can imagine seems worth it to me,” he explains. Then, as an afterthought. “I’m sorry. Maybe this means I won’t turn into you.” 

A broken sound rips from you involuntarily, and you choke it out. It’s half sob, half incredulity. You knew he was going to be like this, you knew because you remember your own certainty, your own unfaltering compulsion to self-destruct no matter the cost. You remember fighting with your future self, thinking he was wrong. He had to be wrong. You believed you could be saved by love, but you didn’t realize you believed it. 

There is no way to save this. You’re only going through the motions so that you can explain a dream you had when you were twenty four, a dream which haunted you for the rest of your existence, mocked you at every step in the deterioration of what was once your pure, un-fragmented love for Jade. He can’t be saved, and when you return fourteen years to the future, nothing will be different. This journey to the past will not alter what you have become.“You will turn into me,” you tell him, acidly. “Unless you stop. Or. ”

“Or what?” He asks through his teeth. 

A silence lies stiff and dead between you. You think about whether or not you can change what you remember yourself saying fourteen years ago, because you don’t remember enough of it to replicate it exactly. It seems like an impossible task, rewriting the past. But you’re here, and you must try, if only to feel like you did everything you could to salvage the pieces of what’s broken, in order to explain why it’s irreparable to the self which still grieves its loss. 

“It was always our plan to die together. You and I and Jade. Die perfect when we were ready to, when there was nothing on earth left for us anymore, right?” You say carefully, words shaking in the vulnerability of their truth. 

His eyes soften, and he nods, glances to Jade. “Yeah.” 

“You’re never going to get there. You’ll never be ready if you keep going, because it will _get fucked up_. So. You can stop. Or. Or you can kill yourselves now. When it’s still perfect.” 

Eyes darkening, he appears as if he actually considers it for a moment. You don’t remember if that’s what was really crossing your mind in this moment of your past. It was a dream, or you thought it was a dream, so your thoughts probably lacked the gravity they required, the gravity you’re attempting to impose upon him now. Patiently, you watch, still fascinated with the way it makes you feel to watch yourself touch Jade fourteen years ago, the fluid ease of it, the way it seems so very taken for granted. Your fingers itch to dig into something, to force blood to the surface of such longed-for and dreamed-of skin. _He is not mine_ your mind repeats, and Davey’s eyes cut back to you. “If I did that, you’d die,” he states plainly. 

If you thought he might actually do it, you wouldn’t have brought it up in the first place, but you already know how this turns out. You lived through it. You are it. This is a script. It seems pointless to actually 

“It’s only a dream,” you remind him. “A nightmare.” 

He nods. The silence stretches between then, and you’re surprised when his clear-as-glass voice interrupts it, softly. “Do you remember how afraid I was? Of running out of time, I mean. of missing the opportunity, to die like this. Die beautiful.” 

Relief washes over you with such force it almost feels like terror. Not the relief of necessitating change, but the relief of being heard. Maybe even understood. “Yes. _Yes_. That’s why I’m here.” Your voice is all caught up in your throat, knotted like twine. 

“So you’re trying to change our past, to change our future?” He asks. 

“Yes,” you whisper, gaze fixed on Jade’s sleeping shadow like there’s something magnetic holding it there. You tear away from it, and realize your eyes are wet. You wipe them. 

Davey cocks his head, then purses his lips. “I don’t think I believe you,” he tells you then in a hoarse, sure tone. 

You’re surprised. You don’t remember this. 

“If you actually wanted to change things, why didn’t you go back to a time where you actually _could_ change things? Like when we were moving from Sacramento to Ukiah? Or when we asked Jade to join the band? Why didn’t you make sure we never even _met_? You could have actually prevented it,” he continues, breathlessly, eyes bright in a way that makes you think of ignition. You haven’t seen your eyes that bright in a mirror in years. It scares you to see him this way, so different from the dry lake that is your heart now, and for a moment you want to press your lips to Davey’s, and suck the innocence out of him and into yourself as if it could restore you to this former glory. “And you also said ‘I didn’t want to hear it,’ which means you’ve been here before. On the other end, as me. So you can’t change anything, it’s one of those self-contained time loops. You heard the same thing you’re telling me now, and you did nothing,” he ends, breathlessly. “You could change things, maybe, but you’re not. Not really. So the real question is why. Why did you really come here?” 

You blink, stare at your hands and their fading tattoos. His words rage and storm inside your head, true and truer still because you don’t know how to answer his question. He’s right. You wouldn't have come here if you thought there might have been the slightest chance of it resulting in this Davey _actually_ ending things with Jade, or killing himself. Denying you the past of pain which made you into what you are now. 

In spite of all of this, in spite of every ounce of agony you still carry around like a skeleton full of hairline fractures, you don’t actually wish for your past or present to change. You loved Jade then, and you love Jade now. It’s a different love, it’s been broken and mangled and torn and sewn and re-sewn into something almost unrecognizable in its ugliness, but it’s still there. It’s still the core of your body, of yourself. You can’t change it, and so you love it for its permanence. You love that you cannot change it. You are only fulfilling a self-fulfilling prophecy, you know there are no such thing as immortal souls, or salvation. 

“Well?” He spits out, voice snagging on the flint in his throat. “Why did you come here?” 

You shake your head slowly. “I don’t know.” 

“I think it’s because you wanted to see this. You needed to see it, to see yourself like this, alive like this, totally unwilling to turn away from the thing that’ll destroy you. You needed to see yourself when you were sure. You needed a reminder, or something.” 

He is so foolish, so arrogant. Your eyes affix again to the shape of Jade beneath the sheets, and wonder if your younger self, whose mind is no longer yours, is right about you and the mess he will become. Maybe you needed to witness the way your room looked, the way your eyes looked when you were young and in love. Or maybe you needed to witness the thing you were in love with, so you could remember what was worth risking the certainty of a hopeless future for. You want to reach out and trace the line of Jade’s sleeping body, but you know he’s not yours to touch. 

“You can go back to sleep,” you say to Davey. “I don’t have anything else to say to you.” 

He blinks and settles back into the bed, rolling away from you so all you can see is the shape of his naked, un-winged spine. He buries his face between Jade’s shoulder blades, and you watch from a distance until his breathing distills down to the pattern of sleep. Your eyes are stinging because you wish it was you in that bed, you wish it was your chest which Jade fit so perfectly against, your palms splayed across the bone which protects his heart. 

It seems strange and impossible, but even here, in the presence of everything which you lost, you find yourself missing your own Jade. The old one, who is also not yours, with his scars and his greys and his his own boundless ocean of regret you are condemned to swim in. That Jade knows you, knows your pain and knows your scars. This Jade does not. You long to be known, no matter what year it is. 

You creep to the other side of the bed, holding your breath and skipping spots in the floor you remember squeaking underfoot. Crouching by the bedside, you peer at this Jade’s sleeping face, his young slack mouth and smooth cheeks. Your breath catches as you lean in, and ever so carefully brush your lips against his dream-feverish eyelid. The smell of his skin is something you have tried to forget, but have never been able to. “You are going to hurt me so, so badly,” you murmur gently, blinking back wetness. “But I don’t care.” You ghost your fingers down his jaw once more, close your eyes, and reopen them. 

You’re back in your own room in 2014. Everything smells different, and outside, dawn is breaking. Aching with the heaviness of a life not within your control, you drag yourself to bed and crawl inside it, pull the sheets above your head to create a new darkness. There, you think of how sharply the memory of fourteen years ago today has been restored, and cradle your skull. It is the exact opposite of what you set out to do.


End file.
